A CRAVING FOR CRITICAL HISTORY

Roger Cooter is concerned about the survival of historiography under the pressures of neoliberal economics and the entertainment industry. His and Claudia Stein's book is a welcome call for “critical history,” which is aware of own fundamental intellectual categories. Cooter emphasizes the importance of self‐reflection and political contextualization of all knowledge‐production. However, although reflection is undoubtedly a virtue, it is not clear whether historiography is under such a severe threat. It is also necessary to ask where the limits of contextualization lie. It is doubtful whether a fully localized and contextualized study removed of all “presentist” categories and language is possible. In addition, one should avoid combining antirealism about natural sciences in the name of anti‐Whiggism with realism about historical knowledge in attempts to provide contextualized accounts of the past. What is needed above all is the hermeneutical dialogue between the language of past agents and the language of present actors.     

HOW TO REINVENT THE FUTURE?

This review essay discusses the historical Zeitdiagnosen in recent scholarly literature, focusing in particular on Jérôme Baschet's Défaire la tyrannie du présent: Temporalités émergentes et futurs inédits (2018). Baschet's book constitutes an original contribution to ongoing debates about our temporal condition in at least three aspects. First, although relying partly on earlier theoretical literature (principally the works of François Hartog), it more significantly draws on the author's long-term engagement with the Zapatista movement. Second, it does not confine itself merely to diagnosing our temporal situation (presentism) but proposes strategies for exiting it. And finally, Baschet's theory of temporality is one part of his far more extensive enterprise of “exiting capitalism,” a project aimed at reconceptualizing the existing foundations of Western civilization. Although previous authors have defined our contemporary regime of temporality by focusing on the present and the disappearance of the future, Baschet claims that it is more accurate to speak about a burgeoning of futures—of completely new modalities of the future that differ significantly from modernist notions of it.     

ITALIAN LEGACIES1

This paper discusses David Roberts's latest book in which he seeks to throw some light on urgent postmodern historiographical issues from the angle of Italian historicism, led by Benedetto Croce (1866–1952) and Giovanni Gentile (1875–1944). Focusing on the relationship between theory and practice, Roberts argues that there was a close relationship between Italian historicism and fascism. On the basis of the principle that “reality is nothing but history”, both Croce and Gentile sought to develop a philosophy that connects historical thinking to action. In this context, Gentile's presentist interpretation of the historical sublime eventually led to totalitarianism, whereas Croce's radical historicism formed the basis of a more liberal view of society. In his discussion of the reception of the Italian tradition, Roberts rejects Carlo Ginzburg's and Hayden White's “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, and concludes that Italian historicism is still relevant to modern historiography. In this paper I show that Roberts, by renouncing an exclusively philosophical approach to the Italian tradition, tends to overlook the underlying issues. In order to redress the balance, I argue that the political issues between Croce and Gentile went back to profound philosophical differences concerning the relationship between philosophy and history on the one hand and between past and present on the other. From this perspective, Ginzburg's and White's debates about the relationship between history and politics, and the role of the historical sublime in historiography, should not be viewed as “misreadings” of Croce and Gentile, but as mere variations on the themes of their predecessors. The relevance of the Italian tradition is therefore not primarily to be found in its response to postmodernism, but in setting the agenda for rethinking the relationship between history and practical life in the contemporary world.     

Modern International Thought: Problems and Prospects

Summary

International intellectual history—the intellectual history of the international and an internationalised intellectual history—has recently emerged as one of the most fertile areas of research in the history of ideas. This article responds to eight essays inspired by my own contribution to this field in Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013). It engages with their positive achievements regarding the recovery of other foundations for modern international thought: for example, in theology, historiography and gender history. It addresses some of the methodological problems arising from the search for foundations, notably anachronism, presentism and diffusionism. It expands on others' arguments about the international thought of Hobbes and Locke and the limits of cosmopolitanism. Finally, it points the way forward for international intellectual history as a collaborative, interdisciplinary, transnational and transtemporal enterprise.     

Change in Reputation as an Index of Genius and Eminence

Abstract

Many previous investigations have relied on entries in encyclopedias or similar sources (e.g., Who's Who) to quantify eminence and achievement. The premises in these earlier studies have been that eminence is a function of reputation and that reputation is accurately captured by encyclopedias and the like. In this article, the authors examine reputational changes from era to era. They expected that a comparison of encyclopedias from different eras would show significant changes, with some eminent persons having reputations (or at least biographical entries) that increase, some having reputations that decrease, and others having stable reputations. Can such change (or stability) be reliably assessed and predicted? To address these questions, encyclopedia entry length from 1911 was compared to encyclopedia entry length from 2002, using 1,004 individuals selected in a previous biographical study. Regression analysis indicates that biographical entries did in fact change significantly. The authors also explore implications for definitions of eminence and for the quantification of reputation.     

DĒMOKRATIA'S POSSIBLE DISCONNECTION: UNTIMELY ANTIQUITY,TEMPORAL OUTSIDENESS,AND HISTORICAL FUTURES OF POLITICS*

This article discusses notions of possible disconnection in the post-1990s political present that are formulated as untimely articulations of the ancient Greek democratic past and of the concept of dēmokratia. These are modalities of transition that foreground political futurity as emanating neither from anticipation of evental change to come nor from abstract utopianism. Rather, dēmokratia’s projected break with the present and presentism is grounded in transtemporal confrontations and routes of historical memory. These are engagements with antiquity that take hold of and refigure the relation among past, present, and future politics, as well as the inside and outside of democracy, at a horizon of Nachleben (afterlife) that sustains no fixed beginning or end. I discuss these temporalities as disconnective in a sense that differs from historical futures opened up by technoscientific or anthropocenic prospects. Dēmokratia challenges the self-narration of present democracy as a project of the future by positing modalities of outsideness, repotentialization of the past, and interweaving of times and political languages in non-narrative terms. The outcome is a form of futurity that opens up the possibility of imagining not only a novel political subject and community but also a logic of their emergence that enables both to be incessantly reconfigured. Dēmokratia’s possible disconnection works against a sense of lost political futurity, but it needs to be recognized as grounded in a state of loss, insofar as political domination may also be built into future democratic principles. For this reason, it invites a reflexive problematic about the representability and translatability of disconnective political futures and communities.     

Ancient history and contemporary political theory: the case of liberty

ABSTRACT

Providing an introduction to this special issue on the ancient notions of liberty and its modern perspectives, this essay contains, first, some reflections about the relation between the fields of ancient history and contemporary political theory. Building on the comments of the final roundtable with Kinch Hoekstra and Quentin Skinner, it then makes an attempt at extrapolating some theoretical understandings of liberty from a wide range of geographical and historical contexts covered in the contributions. Moving away from a strictly classical Graeco-Roman focus, these include investigations from the second millennium BCE polities in the Levant to the Byzantine empire in the fifth-century CE.